Recently my company got rid of a few old laptops and let me grab one. It’s a Compaq Presario 1700. It’s in great shape except for a cracked case. At the same time, our IT guy gave me all the documentation, including a couple of recovery discs, all for the same make and model. The problem is that when I try to do a full factory restore (Windows 98) I get one of two problems.
If I put the disc in and restart, it goes through all the cautions and then just says working. I let it go for an hour and then decided that, no, it wasn’t.
If I try to restore from the “Compaq Support”, it tells me it “Can not locate factory image files. Factory Restore aborted.”
It doesn’t need to be Restored, but I’d like to start with a clean slate.
So does anybody have any ideas?
A lot of Compaq notebooks and desktops came with a “recovery partition” on the hard drive. The recovery software would then wipe the normally-visible part of the hard drive – the primary partition – and transfer the information on the recovery partition to the primary partition. It was possible, though, to delete the recovery partition, and use the space that it was taking up to store your files and such. It is possible that your laptop had a recovery partition which has since been deleted. In this case, using the “Recovery” mode would be impossible unless Compaq were to supply you with software which required no recovery partition to operate. I don’t know if this is the case with your notebook, but the message “Can not locate factory image files. Factory Restore aborted.” leads me to believe it is a possibility.
What happens when it says it’s “working”. Is there any kind of progress meter or anything? My late grandpa had a Compaq and I went over there to do a recovery and found that the Recovery CD was just a branded version of PowerQuest Drive Image (now owned by Symantec) loading a DI image file off the two CDs.
When it says working, there’s no meter or anything. Just a blue screen with “working” on it. There is a partitioned recovery on the hard drive, but I get the same error message as with the disc. I’m barely computer literate, so I’m assuming I’m doing something wrong.
You might also want to doble check the recovery disk itself and make sure it is very specifically for the exact model of notebook you have. Compaq recovery disks are very narrowly tagged to specific hardware platforms. If that platform does not exist, or if the notebook has been sustantially modified (ie orig hard disk replaced with different model hard disk, possibly different baseline RAM config) it can give the recovery disk a bellyache.
Most 1700’s are around 600 mhz. If you beef up the RAM to 256 megs you could actually have a servicable XP machine.
If you suspect the recovery disk is damaged you can try to get another disk from the IS dept anf make a copy, or in some cases making a CD copy of the damaged disk with a good CDRW drive and decent media can work becase the CDRW might be able to read the dodgy parts of the CD that your onboard notebook CD drive cannot.